t the arguments
employed must be identical with those that might formerly have been
used to justify the retention of Hebrew in the curriculum--the
advisability of making acquaintance at first hand with a noble
literature, the mental discipline to be obtained; "Greek has such a
noble grammar!" said one of these enthusiasts. Hugh grew a little
nettled at the tone of the discussion. The defenders of Greek seemed
to be so impervious to facts which told against them. They erected
their theories, like umbrellas, over their heads, and experience
pattered harmlessly on the top. Hugh advanced his own case as an
instance of the failure, of the melancholy results of a classical
curriculum. It was deplorable, he said, that he should have realised,
as he did when he left the university, that his real education had then
to begin. He had found himself totally ignorant of modern languages
and modern history, of science, and indeed of all the ideas with which
the modern world was teeming. The chief defender of Greek told him
blithely that he was indulging the utilitarian heresy; that the object
of his education had been to harden and perfect his mind, so as to make
it an instrument capable of subtle appreciation and ardent
self-improvement. When Hugh pleaded the case of immense numbers of
boys who, after they had been similarly perfected and hardened, had
been left, not only ignorant of what they had been supposed to be
acquiring, but without the slightest interest in or appreciation of
intellectual or artistic ideas at all, he was told that, bad as their
case was, it would have been still worse if they had not been subjected
to the refining process. Hugh, contrary to his wont, indulged in a
somewhat vehement tirade against the neglect of the appreciative and
artistic faculties in the case of the victims of a classical education.
He maintained that the theory of mental discipline was a false one
altogether, and that boys ought to be prepared on the one hand for
practical life, and on the other initiated into mental culture. He
compared the mental condition of a robust English boy, his sturdy
disbelief in intellectual things, with the case of a young Athenian,
who was, if we could trust Plato, naturally and spontaneously
interested in thoughts and ideas, sensitive to beautiful impressions,
delicate, subtle, intelligent, and not less bodily active. He went on
to carry the war into the enemy's country, and to attack the theory of